Re: Can/should Bitcoin software be reconfigured to limit the # of miners?
Can/should Bitcoin software be reconfigured to limit the # of miners to reduce the transaction wait time and transaction fees or does it already do that?
Most miners work in pools. The network only sees the pools. So if you impose limits you'll only kill the solo miners.
In the news the carbon footprint of such high network usage is too high so the above would help reduce that? 
There are plenty of industries on this world that could reduce carbon footprint and they don't. As long as this kind of electricity is delivered, it'll get consumed. I think that more focus should be on developing cleaner energy sources than pointing towards who is using what. As long as the miners don't steal that electricity, it's all worthless bla-bla.
Say limit it to 100,000 miners per wallet?
And if there will be 100k proxies, what you solve?
Then the transaction time & fee & carbon footprint would have a limit?
The transaction time is based on rules that work the same for 10 miners or 10 billion miners. (The only problem is if the number of miners change hugely over rather short periods of times, but you don't care about that.)
1. Can the protocol be changed? What if changing the protocol solves the above 3 problems which are limiting bitcoin as a currency for regular transactions?
The code can be changed if necessary, but since backward compatibility is kept, some will use the old version.
Also, as I tried to point out, your proposals don't seem to fix anything.
2. If you have a limited number of networks say 10,000 to process a transaction this should reduce transaction time? And/or how many miners does it usually take to process a transaction? Not every miner right? 
All the miners compete to find the next block by a pretty tough rule. This ensures Bitcoin's blockchain is basically unhackable.
And as I said, transaction time is decide by other rules. The transaction time is calculated in a way to stay as possible around 10 minutes no matter how many miners there are.